Seal of Verona
The glory and sentiment which overshadowed the Verona of another day have passed, and now the noise of electric trams and the hoot of automobile horns awaken the echoes in the same thoroughfares where one day trampled the feet of warring hosts.
“The glory of the Scaliger has passed,
The Capuletti and Montague are naught:”
Instead we have the modern note sounding over all, and, if it is true that the “fair Juliet sleeps in old Verona’s town” hers must be a disturbed sleep. The romance of Juliet Capulet and Romeo Montague was real enough; that is, there was a real romance of the sort, and there were real Capulets and Montagues. Just where the scene of this particular romance was laid one is not so sure.
The “House of Juliet” at Verona, one of the stock sights of the guide books, is of more than doubtful authenticity. Certainly, to begin with, it does not comport in the least with the dignified marble palace and its halls with which the stage-carpenter has built up the settings of Shakespere’s drama or Gounod’s opera. Perhaps they embroidered too much. Of course they did!
In 1905 the “Juliet House” was in danger of collapsing. As it is nothing more than a picturesque old house, such as northern Italy abounds in, perhaps it would not have mattered much had it fallen. It is no more Juliet’s house than Juliet’s tomb is the tomb of Juliet. This indeed has latterly been adjudged a mere water-trough. No house, it is asserted, in Verona to-day can be declared with certainty as the house of a Montague or a Capulet. Henry James points the moral of all this in “The Custodians,” and whether we can always make head and tail out of his dialogues or not, his judgments are always sound.